Meet CIS Team
Tatsuaki Okamoto
Director
I received B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, in 1976, 1978, and 1988, respectively. With NTT since 1978, I am an NTT Fellow and, presently, Director of NTT Research in the USA. Specifically, I focus on research in cryptography and information security.
In the past, I have served as President of the Japan Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (JSIAM), Director of International Association of Cryptology Research(IACR), and as Program Chair of many international conferences. I received the Best and Life-Time Achievement awards from the IEICE, the Distinguished Lecturer award from the IACR, the Purple-Ribbon award from Japanese government, the RSA Conference award and the Asahi award.
OUR CRYPTOGRAPHY RESEARCH TEAM
Brent Waters
DISTINGUISHED SCIENTIST
I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University in 2004. From 2004-2005, I was a post-doctoral at Stanford University followed by work at SRI as a Computer Scientist. In 2008 I joined the faculty at The University of Texas at Austin. Then in 2019 I was recruited to NTT Research as a Distinguished Scientist. My research interests are within the realm of cryptography computer security. My work focuses on Identity-Based Cryptography, Functional Encryption, and code obfuscation. Recipient of numerous awards and invited papers, I am noted as a founder of Functional Encryption and Attribute-Based Encryption.
Daniel Wichs
Senior Scientist
I am a Senior Scientist at NTT Research and an Associate Professor of Computer Science in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. I received my PhD in Computer Science from New York University, and my MS in Computer Science and BS in Mathematics from Stanford University.
My research covers all aspects of modern cryptography, including its theoretical foundations and its applications to information security. My recent research relates to the cryptographic challenges involved in outsourcing data and computation to the cloud; in particular, this includes the construction of homomorphic cryptosystems that allow the cloud to compute on digitally encrypted and signed data while maintaining its privacy and authenticity.
Mark Zhandry
Senior Scientist
I am a senior scientist in the CIS lab and an assistant professor at Princeton University. I study various aspects of theoretical cryptography, including constructions and applications of software obfuscation and the impact of quantum computing. In 2010, I graduated from UC Berkeley where I majored in electrical engineering, computer science, and physics, and minored in mathematics. I earned my PhD in computer science in 2015 from Stanford University. I earned my PhD in computer science in 2015 from Stanford University, before completing a postdoc at MIT.
Ilan Komargodski
Scientist
I am a Scientist at NTT Research. I earned my PhD in Computer Science in 2017 from The Weizmann Institute of Science. Before joining NTT Research, I spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell Tech. My research focuses on foundational aspects of computer science with an emphasis on cryptography and its interplay with other fields. Most recently, I have been primarily working on designing new cryptographic protocols for secure cloud computation.
Pratish Datta
Scientist
I received my MSc in Mathematics and PhD in Cryptography from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in 2012 and in 2017 respectively. Since 2017, before joining the CIS Laboratories of NTT Research, Inc. in 2019, I worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the NTT Secure Platform Laboratories in Japan under the supervision of Dr. Tatsuaki Okamoto. My mathematical background laid the foundation for my expertise over a wide range of hybrid strategies of provable security. Designing cryptographic algorithms offering advanced functionalities, featuring practical efficiency, and guaranteeing strong mathematical security at the same time is the central goal of my research endeavors. Specifically, I am interested in the design and analysis of functional encryption, attribute-based encryption, signatures, and pseudorandom functions.My findings have been broadly published within the proceedings of frontline international conferences like ASIACRYPT, PKC, ISC etc., and high-impact international journals like Theoretical Computer Science, Algorithmica etc.
Susumu Kiyoshima
Scientist
I am a scientist at CIS Lab. My main research area is cryptography, and my primary interest lies in the design and analysis of cryptographic protocols. My previous works include designing cryptographic protocols that provide strong security guarantees (such as non-malleability, concurrent security, composability, and leakage resilience). I obtained my doctoral degree in Informatics from Kyoto University in 2018.
OUR BLOCKCHAIN RESEARCH TEAM
Shin’ichiro Matsuo
Senior scientist
I am the head of blockchain research at NTT Research Inc. I am also a research professor at Georgetown University and work as a director and blockchain research lead of CyberSMART research center at Georgetown University. I’ve engaged in research on cryptography and cryptographic protocols over 23 years. In 2019, I was program chair of the Scaling Bitcoin workshop and, before that, program committee member of many blockchain related academic conferences like IEEE S&B, CBT, Stanford Blockchain Conference and Crypto Economics and Security Conference. I am also a co-founder of BSafe.network, which is the global and neutral academic research testbed dedicated to blockchain research. Further, as editor and project leader, I oversee two technical reports on the security of blockchain technology at ISO TC307.
Go Yamamoto
Senior Scientist
Fuhito Kojima
Scientist
I am Professor of Economics at Stanford University. In 2003 I received my B.A. at University of Tokyo and then my PhD at Harvard in 2008, both in economics. My research involves game theory, with a particular focus on “market design,” a field where game-theoretic analysis is applied to study the design of various mechanisms and institutions. My recent work includes matching mechanism designs with complex constraints (which has current applications such as medical residency match and daycare seat allocation in Japan). I hold or have held editorial positions in many peer-reviewed journals and serve/served as committee member for various conferences, including the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation.
Aron Laszka
Scientist
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Houston. My research interests broadly revolve around the security and economics of blockchain ecosystems, the security and resilience of cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things, the economics of cybersecurity, and the application of artificial intelligence to cybersecurity. Previously, I was a Research Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University from 2016 to 2017, a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley from 2015 to 2016, and a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Vanderbilt University from 2014 to 2015. In 2014 I graduated summa cum laude with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. In 2013, I was a Visiting Research Scholar at Pennsylvania State University.
